This invention relates to the sensory evaluation of smoking products and particularly to products containing an elongated body of smokable material such as cigarettes, cigarillos and cigars.
In the development of smoking products intended for commercial production, it is customary to conduct sensory evaluations of such products during their development phase to determine whether or not the products possess those attributes which are desired by the consumers of the products. Among the sensory evaluations utilized are those performed by small panels of judges who are trained to characterize the attribute intensities of the products. Such sensory evaluations, known as descriptive testing, require the judges to apply uniform terms to describe the product and to be thoroughly familiar with sensory evaluation techniques.
Descriptive testing has heretofore involved the monadic evaluation of smoking products which are smoked ad lib by sensory judges or panelists who then indicate the intensity of one or more sensory attributes using an anchored, unstructured line scale. Such a testing technique provides information about the relative attribute intensity of each product evaluated but it does not provide any information concerning changes in attribute intensity as the product is consumed. For example, it is generally recognized that tobacco acts as a filtration medium for tobacco smoke. Thus, the composition of smoke reaching a smoker's mouth shortly after a cigarette is lit would be somewhat different from that entering the smoker's mouth near the end of the smoking process because the length of the unsmoked tobacco through which the smoke travels is decreasing as the smoking process proceeds. Smokers who base their evaluation of the intensity of a particular attribute on the first few puffs may reach a different conclusion than smokers who base their evaluation on the last few puffs.
Conventional sensory evaluation methods are also not entirely suitable for use with cigarettes or similar smoking products which have elongated bodies of smokable material that are not uniform throughout their length. This non-uniformity of the smokable material may be designed into the product by a particular manufacturing process such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,880,171 wherein two different types of smoking material are combined in a stratified arrangement. Disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,902,504 is an "engineered" cigarette which includes a rod of smokable material having carbon filled paper incorporated therein in increasing amounts toward the mouth end of the cigarette. When smoking such nonuniform smoking products, it is apparent that the smoke composition and flavor effect delivered will depend in part on the nature of the smoking material that is undergoing combustion at that time. It follows that sensory evaluation of such nonuniform smoking products using conventional testing methods would fail to provide a complete picture of the sensory attributes associated with those products.